Radical leftist to chair French parliamentary finance committee

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French MPs have chosen Éric Coquerel, a radical leftist who calls himself an opponent of neoliberalism and capitalism, to chair the National Assembly’s crucial finance committee, heralding trouble in parliament for president Emmanuel Macron’s minority government.

The elevation on Thursday of Coquerel — an MP in Seine-Saint-Denis north of Paris for Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s red-green alliance, the New Ecological and Social People’s Union (Nupes) — came after Nupes become the largest group in parliament in opposition to Macron’s governing coalition of centrist parties. Assembly rules say the finance committee must be chaired by an opposition MP.

French conservatives have expressed alarm about what Coquerel will do with the committee, which vets national budgets and other financial legislation and has access to confidential tax information, given his hostility to free markets and big companies and Nupes’s campaign pledge to massively increase public spending.

Macron’s government, however, should be able to control the budget and pass financial legislation with the support of the centre-right Les Républicains.

The president won a second term in April by defeating his far-right rival Marine Le Pen but his alliance lost its majority in the assembly in legislative elections in June.

Coquerel, a former militant of the Revolutionary Communist League who was already a member of the assembly’s outgoing finance committee, has said he will play by democratic rules.

“Nupes rejects neocapitalism,” he told the French magazine Marianne before the vote. “I represent real opposition to the system, and the end of [Margaret] Thatcher’s ‘There is no alternative’. But that doesn’t mean we won’t play the democratic game.”

With the first minority government for more than 30 years, French politics is entering a period of political bargaining and compromise unfamiliar to Macron and his supporters, who have had full control of the National Assembly as well as the Élysée Palace for the past five years.

On Thursday, Macron conceded the need for compromise when asked what he was going to do after two months of political drift in France. He said the government would continue to take decisions to help people deal with the rising cost of living and a health sector crisis exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic.

“While it is urgent to act, it’s also normal that such actions take account of the choices of our compatriots and happen in good order,” Macron said in Madrid after a Nato summit.

Élisabeth Borne, Macron’s prime minister, will lay out the government’s programme to the assembly and the Senate on Wednesday, though it is not yet clear whether she will face a vote of confidence.

The first two bills to be presented to parliament — on measures to help people cope with inflation and to curb the pandemic — are not expected to be particularly controversial, but Macron is likely to face opposition over any legislation for the pension reform that was one of the main planks of his manifesto.

Macron and leaders of the Les Républicains have pushed for an increase in the official retirement age from 62 to as high as 65 to cut the cost of the public pension system, but the idea is opposed on the far right by Le Pen and the far left by Mélenchon.

 

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